Jan 05, 2008

Semi-satirical investigation into the Doctor's political leanings using statistical analysis, assuming that real world events are mirrored in the Whoniverse (the author clearly hasn't been within a dragon's breath of AHistory, either volume). Lawrence Miles addresses this very point at some length during the Interference epic in which the character is called upon to explain exactly why he's quite happy to fly about time and space knocking off abusive governments but when it comes to other regimes, particularly on Earth he's rather more circumspect.

I don't remember an answer really being forthcoming other than some deep dish anguish although my understanding has always been that if the Doctor is aware of a status quo before he gets there he can't change it without there being consequences (see Father's Day etc.) but if the situation's totally new to him he can rebel away. Which would explain why he's never specifically gone to meet a young Hitler and tried to persuade him to persevere with his painting (ala John Cusack in the film Max) or whatever. Plus it seems to have been established that Earth has a special place in the web of time, on one of the causal fault lines.

Which is very clever even if, as Steven Moffat would point out, the windows are the wrong size. If this was dimensionally transcendental it would be a neat way to store your entire wardrobe without having to build an extension on your house. After all, doesn't Tardis actually sound like the kind of product name IKEA would give their furniture lines? In fact most of the current real furniture names -- Pax, Hemnes, Aspelund and Mongstad -- all sound like characters from the new series.

Which at first glance would seem to have nothing to do with Doctor Who (other than to say she'd make a smashing companion), except the paper that she co-wrote, "Frontal Lobe Activation during Object Permanence: Data from Near-Infrared Spectroscopy" is about looking into child's brains to find out how they work. Imagine the Fear Factor and the fear factor if in future the BBC simply recorded infant brain activity to discover how to scare the bejesus out of us...

Dec 26, 2007

The original cancellation of Doctor Who dovetailed nicely with the period when I first started to like the girls and the girl I tended to like was Kylie Minogue. She seemed perfectly attainable despite such impediments as apparently living Australia (or the UK it was very confusing), being nothing like her character in Neighbours (at least as far as I could tell from a rather stilted interview she gave on Get Fresh) and being a much older woman (all of six years). But I bought the all the records, filled scrap books with articles and lyrics from Smash Hits, covered my wall with posters and kissed her calendar every night before I went to bed. It was a level of dedication which some religions would consider unhinged and yet there I was praying at the alter of Locomotion (see this post at my own blog for further devotional tales).

Of course, the teenage heart is a fickle thing and when it decided that Better The Devil You Know wasn’t a great single and that Lost In Your Eyes sounded purer, it was down with the Kylie posters and up with the Debbie Gibson ones. But you never forget your first love so it there was no more curious experience watching the two merge into one another last night. Post Charlene, Kylie’s not really had a respected acting career (my heart died a little when I sat through Street Fighter – oh yes I’ve seen everything) but she was really good in this, totally holding her own within the ensemble and particularly against Mr Tennant, not afraid to make fun of her height by standing on a box to kiss him. These one-off companions are difficult because they have to mark themselves out in a very short space of time and make us care and I do think she did that, imbuing Astrid with a likeable wonder but also making her sacrifice entirely plausible.

Plus it’s Kylie dressed as a waitress. What’s not to like?

Elsewhere, writer Russell T Davies was playing the genre game, tossing the Doctor into a disaster movie to see what that would be like. Apparently he’s always wanted to do this since The Poseidon Adventure was the only VHS he had to hand as a kid. Oddly enough, it’s not the first time the franchise has attempted something like this. Fans with long memories might remember that Christopher Bulis’s Vanderdeken's Children, an Eighth Doctor novel, had many of the same figures you’d expect in an Irwin Allen spectacular eventually scuppered by a far too complex plot. It’s not an impossible fit though; Doctor Who stories tend to develop through set pieces and that’s exactly what you find in something like The Towering Inferno and indeed that’s exactly what you got in Voyage of the Damned as the Doctor led a band of familiars from one end of the ship to the other, with the monetary scam and villain an added appendage to explain the disaster.

These were good set pieces, the bit in the corridor, the bit in the stairwell, the bit on the strut. If anything the template was used too well; disaster films are about death; so is Doctor Who apparently but did this really have to be so unremittingly grizzly? Here’s something being served up as pre-watershed family entertainment on Christmas Day which featured mass murder and suicide. I shuddered as I wrote that since it’s clearly what Mediawatch UK were thinking too as they scribbled down all of their criticisms in crayon but I can’t lie and say I didn’t cringe a little bit as the Doctor amongst other things failed to save Astrid and provide a happy send off. Perhaps we should be excited that the show is still willing to bounce off the curve letting the hateful character lives, but the last thing we need at this point is to lose the family audience because parents think the show is too scary, too raw, too ugly, particularly on the holiest of holies.

That said, The Poseidon Adventure is a PG these days.

But as I said in the introduction still managed to raise a chuckle and not just during the closing moments. As well as Mr Copper’s bizarre verbal mincing of Christmas traditions (which when you consider what we actually do aren’t that odd – apart from the boxing) there was the discovery that the residents of old London town had taken the logical step of deserting the place around the festive period based on previous experience. It’s not the first time they’ve done this – remember Invasion of the Dinosaurs – but in a way it’s a shame that the episode couldn’t have been expanded to explore that idea instead; it felt thrown away here but perhaps that’s the big new arc story which will be looked at in the new series, Cribbins included. And wasn’t he marvellous – weren’t all of the guest cast? Some will say that Geoffrey Palmer was wasted but it needed and actor like that for you to believe that Captain would be capable of what he did, just as it needs George Costigan to turn up at the end and be plausibly villainous.

It was certainly one of the best designed episodes of the new series. Some money was clearly spent on the interiors and although the geography of the ship wasn't too clearly defined the strut area may well have been one of the best sets of the series, recalling the propeller room from The End of the World. The exterior shots of the Titanic itself are majestic too although I had a soft spot in particular for the shots of the TARDIS hurtling towards the Earth. It really does make a change to see the Earth from a non-North American point of viewing, seeing Europe and UK floating below us. There’s no denying that the design of the Hosts must have been inspired by some other robots of death – particularly the hair – and it’ll be very surprising if they don’t inspire some merchandise partner to create tree decorations for next Christmas.

I really liked Voyage of the Damned.
It wasn't perfect, but as a Christmas Day post everything slice of action adventure with a
dash of heart it was fine and in the end I laughed like a drain
because sheer audacity of it all. I mean really what else could you do
at the sight of the Titanic dodging the roof of Buckingham Palace with
her Madge, in her rollers, thanking the Doctor for saving the world one
more time, with Nicholas Witchell reporting on events. Sure it’s
pretty camp and arch and typical of many of the things that some
despise nu-Who for, but it’s also hilarious and doing everything which
you never thought you’d ever see in a television programme, least of
all the one you were brought up on. If it didn't quite make up for some of the darkness which had gone before, at least it prepared some viewers for the shitstorm that was about to hit them in the episode of Eastenders that followed.

If it wasn’t quite as affecting as either of the other two specials it's because it didn’t feel like part of the fabric of the series. The Christmas Invasion was clearly all about the regeneration and The Runaway Bride dealing with the loss of Rose. Even though he’d only just dropped off Martha, this felt like a very separate story, rather like an example of spin-off fiction in that you didn’t really need to know about anything else which had happened in the series to enjoy it. Certainly that was the case for the first two or three decades but it threatened here to make the piece inessential. Despite all the murder and mayhem there wasn’t anything as gut busting as the moment when the Prime Minister ordered the destruction of the Sycorax ship or the Doctor watched as the Queen’s children drowned at least not with the sense that it’d have consequences.

But then again, for all we know this could have been the most important episode of the lot, especially as it proved that actually even though he is the Doctor he can't do everything. Roll on the fourth series – “What d’you mean miss? Do I look single?” etc.

Dec 23, 2007

Pantechnicon has a really rather fabulous and revealing two-part interview with script editor Gary Russell which begins with his acting career (bless) and continues almost right up to date at Cardiff (if he's got the IDW gig yet, it only shows in that he says that he wants to write a graphic novel). Great stuff about Big Finish and particularly his feelings about Tom Baker's treatment thereof. I didn't know those three scripts were originally written for him.

Dec 21, 2007

How’s this for timing? You wait years for an intergalactic luxury liner in peril and two come along at once. Luckily, it looks as though in each case the source of that peril is completely different. Well clearly. Whatever’s happening on the Titanic on Christmas Day can’t be as random as the journey the Starship Brilliant is on in here, what with being stuck in a time loop and being menaced by pirate badgers, the only way of travelling about the ship being to dive into something which feels almost but not exactly like scrambled egg. Welcome to the bizarre fantasy that is Simon Guerrier’s The Pirate Loop. Leave your preconceptions at the front cover.

The Doctor and Martha travel to the aforementioned ship to solve the mystery of why it disappeared. The timelord uncovers the truth disappointingly easily but then, as with some of the best Doctor Who stories, has to wrestle with his conscience as to whether he has the right to disrupt recorded history and save the lives of those onboard. It’s in the process of trying to warn the captain that they greet the aforesaid impediments as well as an aristocratic alien race, the Balumin, which Guerrier describes as looking like Mr. Tickle, which isn’t an easy image to ignore really. All of which makes it sound terribly exciting and surprising which it certainly is – but ultimately, despite some discrete moments of charm it doesn’t quite hang together.

The first problem is one which afflicts many of these novels – an over familiarity of ideas. Time loops and paradoxes have become the show’s stock in trades of late, particularly in this past series and certainly you shouldn’t knock anyone whose following in the footsteps of Steven Moffat. Indeed one of the best bits of the novel is right in the middle when the story cuts between the Doctor and Martha in two time periods, the actions of one echoing through to the other. Sadly the big surprise at the centre of that really doesn’t work if you look at it too closely and particularly in relation to Moffat’s work and the alternative might have been a bit more interesting.

The characters too, with the exception of a well interpreted Doctor and Martha, are all fairly irritating. Most of our time is spent in the company of the badgers, bred with the intellect of Forrest Gump to make them malleable and blessed with Home Counties accents which the author takes great pleasure in reproducing – the dialogue is apostrophe central. There is a sweet scene in which Martha explains to them how to eat canapés (no really) but in the end they’re about as appealing as the cavemen in The Tribe of Gum (or whatever it’s being called this decade) and will only work for those with a high tolerance for cutsiness

The Bulamin’s speaking representative is Mrs Wingsworth, essentially an ovoid Margot from The Good Life with extra arms. Again, there’s neat bit of dialogue between her and the Doctor about her low self-esteem (no really again) but other than that like the badgers she’s pretty two dimensional as are some human characters who eventually appear to do some shouting. It’s almost as though Guerrier has deliberately written them as cartoons with the intended audience in mind, but some of the characters in The Infinite Quest had more depth than this. Only the Ood-like mouthless engineers are effective and it’s a shame we don’t spend more time with them.

Despite all of that it’s not an unenjoyable read and sometimes quite ingenious. Guerrier has clearly structured his story in advance and details in the opening chapters pay off well in the end. The reader is always orientated within the ship and the use of analogies keep the readers totally aware of the environment mostly drawn from Martha’s Earthly experience. It’s Martha who probably comes off best in all of this, absolutely in-keeping with the television version with a range of contemporary references to everything from myspace to Facebook in her jacket pocket – something which the Doctor indulges in himself to good effect. But you know what in the end makes this worth reading? A single paragraph of introspection in which our hero ruminates on what would need to be done were he really to lose his companion. It’s perhaps the most powerful bits of writing about the lonely god since the bottom end of The Family of Blood.

The Pirate Loop, by Simon Guerrier, is released by BBC Books on 26 December. ISBN 9781846073472.

Dec 19, 2007

OTT's Graham was at the screening. Potential spoilers (from a certain point of view) but worth reading for the stuff about the Q&A: "Lots of fun, not the most cerebral slice of Who ever, but
terribly exciting, and with one real groaner they could only get away
with on Christmas Day. That's what I reckoned, anyway." New theme music too.

Dec 17, 2007

Freema Agyeman.com (a fansite) notices that IDW have published a five page preview of their new comic: cover, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. This first page is squeetastic and the rest does somehow have a different to the strips in Battle in Time, DWA and DWM. Even though both of the characters only look somewhat like the real thing it works. I'd rather have this than an attempt at photorealism that doesn't look quote right.

Dec 15, 2007

At what point does a spin-off novel become a missing adventure? In the dark decade such things were carefully delineated. Missing adventures usually featured a previous Doctor in a story which could be slotted into old television era, with a sister series featuring the current incumbent, Seventh or Eighth Doctors which weren’t really missing because they wouldn’t have fitted anywhere. Now we have a group of releases which feature the current Doctor but which are supposed to have happened during a gap in the previous series – in that foggy area around Blink when we didn’t really know what our hero was up to apart from being trapped in the past and going all Robin Hood on something. So they really are missing adventures but don’t really seem like it. Perplexing isn’t it. That said Nick Brown from Kasterborous thinks that we fans are cool now. After rereading this paragraph I’m not so sure at least about myself.

So when you pick up something like Trevor Baxendale’s Wishing Well, you’re filling in a gap in the previous series, finding out exactly what happened before the time travellers stopped off in Cardiff for a recharge, accidentally picked up Captain Jack and from a certain point of view inadvertently doomed the future of the human race. There is the opportunity to provide a different kind of entertainment to the television show, situations sometimes that simply aren’t very Saturday night, action that only really works in a textual context. That’s probably why often, these novels sometimes have quite an old school flavour and Wishing Well is a good example of that featuring as it does ‘something dark and sinister lurking in a country village’ – it’s The Daemons, K9 and Company, The Stones of Blood and that great bit in Lance Parkin’s novel The Dying Days when the red death permeates Adisham.

The set up then: after a warning from the local homeless man not to, The Doctor and Martha pitch up in the Derbyshire village of Crighton Mere and become mixed up in a war of words between some students, the local gentry and restoration committee over the titular water source which may or not have buried treasure at the bottom. The Doctor’s convinced that something darker is going on and it slowly becomes apparent that a far more malevolent force than the real ale at the local pub. Baxendale has become something of an old hand when it comes to spin-off fiction with a clutch of Eighth Doctor novels and the odd Big Finish audio to his credit. He’s always been a technically very proficient writer even if his work hasn’t ever been lauded with the likes of Parkin and Cornell. His magnum opus though are his cherishable kid orientated comic strips for Doctor Who Adventures -- short, colourful and always fun journeys full of character (which is what apparently led him to getting a commission here).

This is pretty much the opposite of that. There’s a palpable atmosphere of dread throughout, Baxendale clearly enjoying the chance to do some of the omnipresent darkness that might not be appreciated sandwiched between the mazes and word searches of DWA. Until the final forty or so pages too it’s not particularly pacey, choosing instead to let our heroes get lost in the mystery and the red herrings, attempting to cover the truth about the well amongst the old wives tales and urban legends. That said is isn’t a particularly complex tale – most of the scenes happen around the mouth of the well, in the tunnels underneath and at the local manor and just now and then you do wish that it was a more complex story which is tricky with this number of pages and potential audience, but some of the scenes are rather stagey considering that they’re being rendered in prose.

Apart from the oh so typical students, there’s an admirable lack of younglings amongst the characters. Baxendale instead concentrates on Sadie and Angela, two witty local pensioners (‘I’m 83’ the latter muses at some point) and Henry Gaskin the local land owner. It’s the cast of the Christmas To The Manor Born, probably, which adds that different tone to the proceedings and teaches kids the valuable lesson that the older you are, the wiser you generally are too (the Doctor is 903 or thereabouts after all). There’s a gentle animosity between Angela and Henry after he apparently let her husband die in a climbing accident that adds an extra thematic layer about the frailty of human life which pays off at the very end. The Doctor and Martha are very well evoked too with the timelord in particularly making a couple of big speeches and getting very excited about something his companion’s suggested.

The book just lacks ambition, an extra zing. Since it is in prose and there is an unlimited budget it’s baffling that Baxendale would choose such a mundane setting and small scale story. The latest Doctor Who Magazine reveals that he didn’t – he’s writing to a remit the ‘something dark and sinister lurking in a country village’ idea coming from series editor Justin Richards. Presumably the plan, like the old fashioned BBC Missing Adventures is to produce something which is indistinguishable from its given era and it certainly carries that off (particularly the villain of the week and the resolution which will both be familiar to fans of a certain tv episode and oddly enough readers of one of this quarter’s other releases Peacemaker). If that’s what you’re look for then there’s much to enjoy and plenty of humour amid the gloom; otherwise seek out the author’s strips for Doctor Who Adventures. They’re ace and totally unlike anything else you’ll ever read.

Wishing Well, by Trevor Baxendale, is released by BBC Books on 26 December. ISBN 9781846073489.

Dec 11, 2007

"As if that wasn't enough, there are also the truly ridiculous lyrics penned by someone who had clearly neither seen nor heard of the Daleks, making reference to them having a 'foam inflated head' and a 'big red toe' from which festive stockings can be hung. There are also, for no apparent reason, some bleep-festooned 'blanked out' bits that sound worryingly like an attempt to cover up some stray bad language. And what does the young narrator want with this malevolent mutant in metal casing? Only to "say hi to mum and frighten daddy out of his bed", that's what."

It does have to be heard to be believed. And indeed until I heard it I wondered what the likes of Belinda Carlisle and Jane Weidlin were doing singing about the pepperpots. Clearly a different The Go-Gos. Last available on the currently deleted Who Is Dr Who? which also includes fragments of the fledgling (some would say cash-in) pop careers of Frazer Hines, Jon Pertwee and little Roberta Tovey.

A new executive producer's been announced for Doctor Who, taking over from Julie when she leaves the post in time for the fifth series. In future, podcasts and dvd commentaries will be begin with 'Hello faithful viewer, I'm Piers Wenger.' I hadn't realised that her role on the series and as Head of BBC Wales Drama were so inextricably linked and it will be a shame to see her go.

Dec 10, 2007

Considering he has a space and time ship, the Doctor has opened the TARDIS doors in the old wild west surprisingly little. There’s only really been the 60s story The Gunfighters, what would now be described as a celebrity historical in which the then crew were mixed up with the gunfight at the OK Coral (referenced herein as the reason for the time lord’s reluctance to pay the era a visit) and a smattering of short stories, particularly Lance Parkin & Mark Clapham’s A Town Called Eternity from the BBC anthology Short Trips and Sidesteps which was more Wild Wild West than High Noon.

But then science fiction and westerns have never tended to mix that overtly, never quite working out how to balance the recipe – you either copy the tropes of the genre but not the icons (Star Wars) or appropriate them and make them a twist (Westworld). Only really Joss Whedon's Firefly has got it completely right, at least in its television incarnation; the film Serenity went more in the space opera direction apparently because the studio noted that the public might not be too comfortable with seeing these two genres existing side-by-side (even though the sight of a spaceship scaring the hell out of horses in a desert is rather nifty).

James Swallow’s Peacemaker hopes to redress the balance and for the most part succeeds, mixing the tropes of the western genre into the Doctor Who horse trough and although predictably in the end the phasers outgun colt 45s there’s enough here to convince you that a television revisit would not be an unappalling idea. The Doctor and Martha roll into the town of Redwater, Colorado just as its getting over the effects of a small pox epidemic, apparently cured by a travelling flim flam man with clearly no medical training and a medicine which obviously isn’t. Not long afterwards two outlaws enter town with murderous intent looking for the fake medic and all hell breaks loose.

As well as a range of Star Trek novels and a few Big Finish short
stories, Swallow also has the Sundowners series of steampunk western
novels in his holster so he's comfortable in this cross genre teritory. Clearly and rightly one of the author's main influences in Back To The Future III, with the appearance of a Mary Steenburgen-like teacher and this Doc getting on the wrong side of the local gambler and said outlaws.

As with that film, all of the characters feel as though they’re passing through from a western movie or novel, rather than the actual period in history which is understandable given the audience for the book (and indeed when it’s suggested that they visit Deadwood, the Doctor remarks that it’s a bit rude). If anything the author seems a bit more comfortable in these earlier scene setting chapters, and the reader gets a great sense of the town and its people, particularly said teacher Jenny, a rich invention whose a romantic potential might have flourished even more given a greater word length.

It’s a pity then that as the book goes on and the science fiction begins to intrude that the story becomes more derivative with many of the repetitive elements we’ve seen from the new series making an appearance. To describe what they are would perhaps spoil one or two of the few surprises, except to say that what’s done as a money saving measure on screen needn’t happen quite so much in the prose versions. Unless Swallow is making some meta-reference to how genre works tend to be pretty lacking in originality anyway.

That said, he nails this alien presence which is particularly epic and creepy, especially because of their knowledge of who the Doctor is and what’s he’s capable of if pushed. The concluding battle of wits takes full advantage of being in prose and would be really difficult to recreate on film without resorting the kind of thing some us endured during the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Night Terrors. They really bring out the lonely god's potential darkness and we even learn a bit more about what he was like during the time war, the suggestion being that he deliberately tossed out some of his fundamental beliefs in order to claim victory something hinted at but never confirmed before.

Despite all of this, the book is always entertaining. The central relationship is brilliantly captured (on his own website he says 'I really liked the chemistry between David Tennant's manic-dynamic
Doctor and the competent and smart Martha Jones' and this is one of those rare occasions in the spin-off fiction that the story feels part of the tissue of the television programme, with some of the concerns of the third series making an appearance including Martha’s mother’s Saxon fueled disapproval of their friendship, the unrequited love she has for the time lord and her building confidence.

Most of the major monsters are name-checked and it’s because she’s been able to face down the Daleks and The Family of Blood that she’s able to do some of the things she does here. If the Doctor just now and then becomes a bit generic, most of the time he’s very much the Tennant model, jumping about, repeat repeat repeating words and phrases and dropping pop culture references. But significantly in a charming rather than annoying way, which again is something other authors have never seemed to get quite right. It’s this duo and their infectious humour which ultimately makes the novel so engaging and one of the best of spin-off range so far.

Peacemaker, by James Swallow, is released by BBC Books on 26 December. ISBN 9781846073496.